Issues While Gathering Project Data

So this blog post is going to be fairly short. I originally intended for it to be longer and have more substance, but due to some issues I ran into while working on gathering my data I will not have as much to say.

I might come back to this and update it once I figure out my next steps or I might just make a separate post about that.

Original Plan:

So my original plan for gathering the data I needed for the project on real estate sales trends was to use the Zillow API and get data on various properties within a region. However, after creating an account and getting my api key for their web services, I tried to collect data and that is where I ran into some issues. After using the .get() method from the requests library to pull information on one of the properties, I checked the status of my request with the .status_code property and it came up as status code 200, meaning it successfully returned a response. Cool, it worked then, right? Nope, when I tried to look into the response, I was getting errors so I used the .text property to just look at exactly what was returned. What I found was that although a response was returned, my account did not have authorization to make that API call. After doing some research, trying a few different things, I realized that due to a change with registering for API access, not all features are readily available. So no guarantees to get that access.

New Plan:

So the new plan is to look into other real estate websites with APIs and to see how easy or hard it would be to scrape the data directly from one of their websites. Hopefully one of those options will pan out, worst case the scraping will be more difficult than anticipated, but I will make it work. Again, I might revisit and update this post with the response or make a new post about it.